In my last three columns, I looked at the health and economic burden of unhealthy diets, the role of large parts of the food industry in producing and marketing an unhealthy diet, and the ways in which our current food system harms the planet.
Moreover, the industry spends a lot of money lobbying governments to protect itself and promote its own interests. Note that this is the industry’s interest, which should not be confused with the public interest. Indeed, they add, the World Health Organization has expressed concern that such activity “may limit governments’ abilities to develop and maintain effective public health policies.”
Using data from Canada’s Registry of Lobbyists, the researchers found the vast majority — around 90 per cent — of registered lobbyists and the corporations and organizations they represented had ties to industry, meaning the public interest barely got a word in edgeways, suggesting “a strategic advantage of industry stakeholders in influencing Canadian policymakers.”
So effective was this, in fact, that the Globe and Mail reported in 2017 that the industry tried an end run by asking Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to lobby Health Canada for them. The bad news is that “the policy which received the greatest amount of attention from industry resulted in failed policy implementation.” It died in the Senate in 2019.
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